A clash of Titans. LX

The stones crying out again?

Did Archaeologists Discover The Biblical City Of Sodom?
Here's one potential site.
Carol Kuruvilla





The fiery fate of the doomed cities of Sodom and Gomorrah has captured the imaginations of artists, theologians and archaeologists for years. The book of Genesis describes how God "rained down burning sulfur" to punish those cities for their wickedness, destroying all living things inside of them.

But is there any proof that these cities really existed and that they were destroyed by a sudden The answer, for Dr. Steven Collins, a professor of Biblical studies and apologetics at Trinity Southwest University, is yes. He claims he may have located Sodom.

Since 2005, Collins and his team have been studying an archaeological site in the southern Jordan Valley known as Tall el-Hammam. After wrapping up the tenth season of excavations, he believes they've found a "goldmine of ancient monumental structures and artifacts" that suggests the site was a powerful city-state during the Early and Middle Bronze Ages (between 3,500 and 1540 B.C.)

Over the years, his research team has found evidence of a massive defensive wall, a palatial structure and a gateway complex that dates back to the Middle Bronze Age. During the 2015 season, the archaeologists found a few more towers and gates.

For Collins, all of this points to the fact that Tall el-Hammam was likely one of the largest cities east of the "Kikkar," a Hebrew word that describes the plains near the Jordan River. He also claims that Tall el-Hamman is strategically located near ancient water resources and trade routes.  calamity?The answer, for Dr. Steven Collins, a professor of Biblical studies and apologetics at Trinity Southwest University, is yes. He claims he may have located Sodom.

Since 2005, Collins and his team have been studying an archaeological site in the southern Jordan Valley known as Tall el-Hammam. After wrapping up the tenth season of excavations, he believes they've found a "goldmine of ancient monumental structures and artifacts" that suggests the site was a powerful city-state during the Early and Middle Bronze Ages (between 3,500 and 1540 B.C.)

Over the years, his research team has found evidence of a massive defensive wall, a palatial structure and a gateway complex that dates back to the Middle Bronze Age. During the 2015 season, the archaeologists found a few more towers and gates.

For Collins, all of this points to the fact that Tall el-Hammam was likely one of the largest cities east of the "Kikkar," a Hebrew word that describes the plains near the Jordan River. He also claims that Tall el-Hamman is The professor says there's a good chance that the Biblical text is referring to Tall el-Hammam when it describes Sodom.

"Tall el-Hammam seemed to match every Sodom criterion demanded by the [Bible]," he told Popular Archaeology. "When we explored the area, the choice of Tall el-Hammam as the site of Sodom was virtually a no-brainer since it was at least five to ten times larger than all the other Bronze Age sites in the entire region, even beyond the Kikkar of the Jordan."

His team also unearthed evidence that suggests the booming city came to a sudden end near the end of the Middle Bronze Age, which is close to the time that Collins believes the Biblical leaders Abraham and Lot walked the earth. It's unclear what caused the city's change in fortune, but one possibility is that it was destroyed by fire. The site reportedly remained a wasteland for about 700 years after this event.strategically located near ancient water resources and trade routes.  Collins isn't alone in his quest to find Sodom. Other scholars have suggested that Sodom and Gomorrah rose to prominence in the early Bronze Age and that they were located in different regions near the Dead Sea. 

Hershel Shanks, the editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review magazine, agreed that Tall el-Hammam seemed like it could be the site of ancient Sodom -- but he cautioned that locating an ancient city destroyed by God is at its core a theological question.

"Theological questions are not subject to scientific proof—or disproof.  But whoever wrote down this text did have some site in mind when he said that God destroyed Sodom," Shanks told The Huffington Post in an email. "Tall el-Hammam is an excellent candidate for the site the author of the Biblical text had in mind when he said that God destroyed Sodom."

The stones crying out again? II

The stones crying out again? III

The Stones crying out again? IV

The defense of fortress Darwin about to get even tougher?

Design in the 4th Dimension: The 4D Nucleome Project
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

The Human Genome Project completed in 2003 was only the start of something far grander: understanding the entire “nucleome” of genetic activity. First there was the genome: the sequence of nucleotide bases. Then there was the transcriptome, the library of transcribed elements, studied by the ENCODE consortium. Then there was GENCODE and modENCODE, which elaborated the regulatory elements that modify transcription. Now, Nature has introduced the 4D Nucleome Project: an investigation of how all these factors interact in space and time.

The 4D Nucleome Network aims to develop and apply approaches to map the structure and dynamics of the human and mouse genomes in space and time with the goal of gaining deeper mechanistic insights into how the nucleus is organized and functions. The project will develop and benchmark experimental and computational approaches for measuring genome conformation and nuclear organization, and investigate how these contribute to gene regulation and other genome functions. Validated experimental technologies will be combined with biophysical approaches to generate quantitative models of spatial genome organization in different biological states, both in cell populations and in single cells. [Emphasis added.]

We have reason to expect more problems for Darwinism with this bold initiative. For one thing, there is no mention of evolution in the lengthy paper, or of natural selection or any other Darwinian term: fitness, beneficial mutation, selective pressure — nothing. There are, in contrast, plenty of design-friendly words, particularly function and regulation and their derivatives.

The human genome contains over 20,000 genes and a larger number of regulatory elements. Large-scale studies over the last decade have catalogued these components of our genome and the cell types in which they are active. The ENCODE, Roadmap Epigenome, International Human Epigenome Consortium, EpiGeneSys (http://www.epigenesys.eu/en/) and FANTOM projects have annotated thousands of genes and millions of candidate regulatory elements. However, our understanding of the mechanisms by which these elements exert regulatory effects on specific target genes across distances of kilobases, and in some cases megabases, remains incomplete.

Another reason for expecting good material for ID advocates is that the consortium is focused on looking for reasons for things. We can expect the junk DNA myth to continue to vanish.

In the section “Relating Structure to Function,” the authors describe how researchers in the 4D Nucleome Network will use tried-and-true methods of tweaking genes to see what breaks:

An important and overarching goal is to determine how genome structure and chromatin conformation modulate genome function in health and disease. To this end, the 4DN Network will explore experimental approaches to manipulate and perturb different features of the 4D nucleome. First, using CRISPR–Cas9 technologies, DNA elements involved in specific chromatin structures, for example, domain boundaries or chromatin loops, can be altered, re-located or deleted. Second, defined chromatin structures, such as chromatin loops will be engineered de novo by targeting proteins that can (be induced to) dimerize with their partner looping proteins (for example, ref. 7). Third, other CRISPR–Cas9 approaches will be used to target enzymes (for example, histone-modifying enzymes, structural proteins) or ncRNAs to specific sites in the genome. Fourth, several groups will perturb nuclear compartmentalization by developing methods for ‘rewiring’ chromosome regions to different nuclear compartments, either by integrating specific DNA sequences that are capable of autonomous targeting of the locus to different nuclear compartments or by tethering certain proteins to these loci to accomplish similar re-positioning. Fifth, cell lines will be generated for conditional or temporal ablation of nuclear bodies or candidate chromosome architectural proteins (such as CTCF and cohesin) or RNAs. Sixth, additional methods will be developed to nucleate nuclear bodies at specific chromosomal loci. Finally, biophysical approaches will be developed to micro-mechanically perturb cell nuclei and chromosomes followed by direct imaging of specific loci. Although it remains challenging to establish direct cause-and-effect relationships, analysis of the effects of any of these perturbations on processes, such as gene expression and DNA replication, can provide deeper mechanistic insights into the roles of chromosome structure and nuclear organization in regulating the genome.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” the proverb goes, but sometimes breaking things is the best way to learn how something works. What happens if we change the shape of a chromosome? What happens if we remove a non-coding RNA (ncRNA), or send it to a different site? What happens if we “rewire” chromosome regions to different nuclear compartments? Experiments will allow teams to build up pictures of what elements regulate what processes.

Just as ENCODE teams at multiple institutions determined that most of the genome is transcribed, the 4D Nucleome Network is likely to find that most of the genome is functional.

After determining the complete DNA sequence of the human genome and subsequent mapping of most genes and potential regulatory elements, we are now in a position that can be considered the third phase of the human genome project. In this phase, which builds upon and extends other epigenome mapping efforts mentioned above, the spatial organization of the genome is elucidated and its functional implications revealed. This requires a wide array of technologies from the fields of imaging, genomics, genetic engineering, biophysics, computational biology and mathematical modelling. The 4DN Network, as presented here, provides a mechanism to address this uniquely interdisciplinary challenge. Furthermore, the policy of openness and transparency both within the Network and with the broader scientific community, and the public sharing of all methods, data and models will ensure rapid dissemination of new knowledge, further enhancing the potential impact of the work. This will also require fostering collaborations and establishing connections to other related efforts around the world, for example, the initiative to start a European 4DN project (https://www.4dnucleome.eu), that are currently under development. Together these integrated studies promise to allow moving from a one-dimensional representation of the genome as a long DNA sequence to a spatially and dynamically organized three-dimensional structure of the living and functional genome inside cells.

Exciting days are ahead. If the sequence alone was sufficient for a design inference, how much more will a 3-D spatial organization operating in the 4th dimension of time be likely to proclaim design?

The focus of this project on function is driving innovation. To accomplish their goals, researchers will have to come up with new instruments, techniques, and models. Instead of dismissing what they don’t understand as junk, they want to know what the nucleome is doing. This is healthy for science. It’s bound to engender profound discoveries, deepening our understanding of genetics and epigenetics. It’s bound to provide practical applications for health and medicine.

Let’s make some ID predictions: (1) The spatial arrangement of nuclear elements (such as chromosomes) will prove to be functional. (2) The time interactions of elements will prove to be functional. (3)  Dan Graur will get angrier.

The turtle v. Darwin

Turtles All the Way Down?
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

We ordered and have now just received our copy of  Turtles as Hopeful Monsters: Origins and Evolution (University of Indiana Press), by paleontologist Olivier Rieppel at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Thus far, the book appears to be worth every dime. From the Amazon description:

Where do turtles hail from? Why and how did they acquire shells? These questions have spurred heated debate and intense research for more than two hundred years. Brilliantly weaving evidence from the latest paleontological discoveries with an accessible, incisive look at different theories of biological evolution and their proponents, Turtles as Hopeful Monsters tells the fascinating evolutionary story of the shelled reptiles. Paleontologist Olivier Rieppel traces the evolution of turtles from over 220 million years ago, examining closely the relationship of turtles to other reptiles and charting the development of the shell. Turtle issues fuel a debate between proponents of gradual evolutionary change and authors favoring change through bursts and leaps of macromutation.

We opened the book and started browsing. Here’s a great passage, picked more or less at random:

The problem of the transformational paradigm results — to use the terminology of Adolf Remane — from the nonexistence of a zero-value ancestor, one that would show no special adaptations of any kind to any particular environment, and for this reason would not have been viable (Nullwertahne). To derive a transformed, newly adapted structure from an ancestral one requires the ancestral structure to be primitive, or generalized, in all aspects relative to the derived structure. Such a totally generalized ancestral structure would, however, not be adapted to any specific mode of life. But every living organism must somehow be adapted to some sort of mode of life. This renders such a generalized, zero-value ancestor that is not adapted to any specific mode of life a biological impossibility.  (p. 122)

Reminds one, doesn’t it, of Stephen Meyer’s discussion in Darwin’s Doubt of the implausibility of the “shmoo” common ancestor for the Metazoa (pp. 111-113).  You’ve gotta love Rieppel’s term for this: “zero-value ancestor.”

A revelation uncorrupted.

But let us be clear believing that the  revelation of the God of Abraham to the Hebrews(including the Hebrew Messianists of the 1st century) remains uncorrupted does not mean that one must now subscribe to nonsensical notions such as that there are three who are almighty God or that that humble and loyal servant of God Jesus son of Mary ever claimed to be almighty God or one third of almighty God or that it is lawful to address his Mother Mary in prayer,or to have idols in ones holy place even if these are claimed to be in the likeness of he or his mother.

 Rest assured that if such nonsense has been a barrier to your examining these scriptures your concerns are utterly unfounded.No,rather a Careful consideration of these scriptures will leave you better equipped to re-adjust those who have been misled by Christendom's clergy in these matters.

 For instance in the gospel of the apostle John Companion of Jesus.Jesus Christ is recorded to have stated the Following:John7:16-18NKJV"Jesus answered them and said,"My doctrine is not mine,His who sent me.If anyone wills to do his will,he shall know concerning the doctrine,whether it is from God or whether I speak of my own authority.He who speaks from himself seeks his own glory;but he who seeks the glory of the one who sent him is true,and know unrighteousness is in him."

  Thus we have the word the messiah himself that if he were seeking his own glory(and certainly if he were claiming to be the almighty God of Abraham,Isaac and Israel he would have been seeking his own Glory) that his message should not be trusted.But repeatedly he urged the worship of the creator of the heavens and the earth alone as God almighty.

 To further confirm this we read also at:John8:50NKJV" And I do not seek my own glory;There is one who seeks and who judges."

  In other words there is one seeking his own glory and who judges those who do not give him due Honor(i.e almighty God) but this one is not me.This really ought to leave the matter clear in the mind of any sincere truth seeker.Indeed a prayerful study of the Gospels and the writings of the companions of Jesus the messiah will indeed prove to be a blessing from the creator of mankind.